Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I take on board everything the Senator has said. I hope the Revenue Commissioners and especially the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection are listening. I get what the Senator says about how the scheme was designed. My comments are general comments. I am not saying they are specific to Aer Lingus but I am sure the people in Aer Lingus will be listening closely to what I have to say. There may be confusion on the part of some employers. They may have mistakenly assumed that they cannot claim the TWSS and the PUP alongside any other social protection payment. In many cases, employees would have been entitled to the short-term social welfare payment but maybe the employer was not sufficiently au faitwith the social welfare legislation. I understand that it has led to a lot of confusion for some companies. Some employers have given letters to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection saying they now understand that there would have been an entitlement under the short-term social welfare payment but not under the PUP. Those claims are in the system and I believe once the claims are in the system they should be effective from the date the TWSS was introduced.All that is in the system and is mainly with the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. That has yet to be teased out and I hope it will deal with it properly.

The scheme was designed to maintain people's net pay. Some employers looked at the net pay, whatever particular payment they were given under TWSS, and may have incorrectly deducted some moneys from the net payment such as trade union dues or payments to a credit union thus reducing the payment received. The employers were not entitled to do so. Some employers have made mistakes and they will have to correct same. It is important that the employees are on top of the situation concerning non-statutory deductions.

The Senator asked for a full review. There might be a reason a particular company in financial difficulty may choose not to pay the maximum payment during the period and I speculate as to the reason. First, if a company maintains pay at a particular level and then must deal with redundancy payments for those employees down the road, perhaps it would use this as a mechanism not to have their average net pay in the run up to a period of anticipated change or redundancy that could happen to reduce the redundancy payment that employer might have to pay down the road. I would call that financial engineering.